Archive for September, 2008
Greg Sandow has been asking lately whether formal attire is still valid for classical music concerts in this modern age. The same question has been asked for a while now regarding attire for student concerts. Well-funded suburban schools tend to have spiffy uniforms for their ensembles–even full-on tuxes for their top wind and string orchestras–while in less affluent or organized (or other factor) schools the Concert Band wears their marching uniforms for their spring concert. School bands farther in or out of town may well have trouble achieving that much, for reasons which may include funding, parental support, local culture, or “other”.
We all know that the first impression speaks the loudest. When a group walks on stage with focus and raise their instruments in one motion, the audience (most of whom are musically uneducated anyway) is compelled to quiet down and listen. Many of us have been disappointed to discover that the spring concert was judged more by the choice of Santana’s “Smooth” as a closer (which your kids cleaned in an afternoon) than by the execution of the running passages in, say, Mvt 3 of Norman Dello Joio’s Satriric Dances (which your students slaved over for weeks). I would posit that the same is true for their attire; when the ensemble members look sharp, then parents, siblings and friends are more likely to take them seriously, give them the benefit of the doubt, etc.
On the other hand, coming back to Greg Sandow’s point, is formal attire a good idea for young people? Do your students hate it? It could turn in to a recruiting and retention sticking point. More to my point, however, is that we should be teaching our students a wider repertoire of music and teaching it to them in culturally authentic contexts. That symphonic work was composed at a certain time, for a certain audience. Shouldn’t your students (and audience) experience it as similarly as possible to how it was intended?
The caveat is that the opposite would be true (but for the same reason) for your group playing a concert of rock/pop music. Marching ensembles have been on the leading edge in this regard, with color guards in themed costumes for field shows and entire indoor drumline shows in theme-specific garb. I have a yearning to do an entire evening of 50’s era cool and blue jazz with my jazz ensemble split up into combos, and make it really a cafe, with coffee and dessert being served and the sound of clinking glasses. It’s not a new idea; schools have done this before as a fund raiser for the jazz band trip or for service hours. But I want to actually transform the space by bringing in couches, green shag carpets and cafe tables, everything but the cigarette smoke….and I want to enlist the theater department to costume my jazz students in narrow-cut suits and skinny ties. Better yet, I want to rent out a real jazz club in town on a Tuesday night for the spectacle. Afterwards, for the rest of their lives, I want my students to look at the pictures on their own copies of Kind of Blue and see the dark cafe, smell the coffee, feel the suit. A real multisensory experience. Another idea I am working up the guts to stage is a full-out rock concert with my wind ensemble: leather pants, big hair, mics clipped to the bells of clarinets, wah-wah pedal on the trombone and lots of distortion on the oboe solo. Again, trying to create a personal, emotional connection to musicians from a certain time and place. Until I work up the cojones stage one of these stunts, my concerts will contain a wide variety of music, but leaning towards symphonic. That leaves me dressing my students for the sit-down formality of shirts and ties.
Do you think that (semi-) formal attire improves the student concert experience? I do. I want to build the community expectations at my current school over the next three to five years to include formal attire for my top ensembles. My stated objective in this regard is for students to feel like their performance is just as serious and important as that of the best professional symphony in the world. I want my students to watch professional performances and feel a personal, emotional connection. When my students go on stage, I want them to feel like they are the center of the universe for one hour.
September 18th, 2008
I’m not saying that I’m losing my hair. All I’m saying is, if I were a superhero, my codename would be Captain Forehead.
September 18th, 2008
As a postscript to yesterday’s entry, I would like to share a little bit of silliness that I engage in. Call it a game with myself. The first pic is of the back wall of the rehearsal hall, where I can see it during rehearsal. It is a motto for myself-a little reminder during class time to focus on the “play vs. talk” balance. The second pic is of a banner that hangs over the inside of my office door. My students probably don’t know it exists; it is the last thing I see before I walk from my office into the rehearsal room. What thought do you want on the tip of your tongue as you greet your young proteges?
September 16th, 2008
Kids. Oi, kids. Can you believe that you used to be one? Just as smelly, immature, hasty, disorganized, smelly and immature as the kids you teach? It boggles my mind to think what I would say to myself if I had me in my 7th grade band. I would probably beat me with a stick and lose my teaching license.
My inspiration today comes from Doug Butchy. Check out his recent theme of recruiting and retention in his bands for a little backstory. I think most of us have felt his sting and asked his questions at some point in our careers.
Why do upper elementary/ middle school kids join Band? Lots of folks have had pretty good answers, none of which include “love Classical music” or “want to practice scales” or “want to practice every night for seven years so that the Band can win State contest when I’m seventeen years old”. I have an answer, and it may be a little different. I say that kids in the Twenty-First Century join band because…
they want to feel like rock stars.
Most adolescents haven’t heard enough Classical music to connect with it. Few adolescents have heard music performed live more than once or twice. It is a rare child who comes from a home where family and friends gather around a piano or whip out the guitars and sing together on a Saturday night. For the vast majority of our students, their connection with music in real life (kudos and apologies to the elementary general music teachers) is MTV. Real life, that is, in a way that is cultural and personal. Many general and vocal music teachers have discovered that their students sing without inhibition if they can hold a “mic” prop, a la American Idol; even a whiteboard marker will do. This is because students have never witnessed singing without seeing bright lights and big amplifiers.
We also know from brain research that during adolescence the brain develops in leaps and bounds in the regions that control emotions, such as the medulla oblongata (have you ever seen Adam Sandler’s Waterboy?) Brain scans show that barely any blood circulates in the logic center–the neocortex–during the Beginning Band years. You already know from personal experience that middle school students operate seemingly without logic, and value only their budding social lives…so apply that to your Band classes!
Ergo, if students are to take an interest in Band, put forth the effort to work through the squeaks and squawks of the first two months of Band, sustain daily practice through middle school, and sweat through their first year of marching, then it is because we take their modern cultural background into account and because we go straight to the emotional connection. If the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, then the quickest way to a beginning clarinetist’s heart is through MTV-type associations. Rock star, here we come.
I don’t have all the answers in this vein, but I can make a few concrete suggestions.
1. Don’t shy away from the rock/hip hop tunes, even as you sneak in the art music.
2. Consider colored stage lights and amplified guitar, bass and piano in the middle school concert band. Don’t be afraid of the occasional gimmick at the middle school concerts.
3. Have the Beginning Band play a performance for their parents and invited friends within the first ten weeks, no matter how informal.
4. Find and exploit every possible performance opportunity for your students, no matter how small. Make a simple arrangement of Happy Birthday, obtain a list of teacher birthdays on your campus, and send the kids on hit-and-run guerilla birthday commando missions to hunt down and serenade teachers on their birthdays. If you are lucky enough to have a shared campus, invite elementary classes for a five- or ten-minute concert any time you have anything ready to play. Elementary students clap and cheer and ooh and ahh over anything, and your middle schoolers will feel like a million bucks.
5. Any time you have a performance of any sort, whether formal or informal, announce all pieces or introduce all students as if your students were the (insert sports team here) running down the tunnel and onto the court/field of (insert sports facility here). Better yet, get the announcer for the high school football team to do it just like a pep rally.
6. In class, make time for music of “no artistic value” that the kids enjoy. Write the riffs out yourself if you have to. They will love you for it, and you might be surprised how many musical concepts you can cover if you can just keep your ears open for what they are listening to this week. Even Britney Spears’ “Oops I Did it Again” is a great song for showing off triads/arpeggios.
Many of these suggestions involve shallow changes. That’s the beauty of it! Adolescents typically only see the surface of things, allowing you to engage them on a basic, emotional level without changing your philosophy regarding counting systems or use of the tuner. Make kids feel like rock stars, and they’ll do your recruiting for you.
Be a rock star!
September 15th, 2008
One simple thought for you today: I would pay many thousands of dollars for a full score to the musical Guys and Dolls. This score is condensed to the extent that accurate portrayal of any part in the orchestra is pretty well impossible. I don’t know who to cue, I don’t know what rhythm or articulation they have, and I have to ask the students “who has the…?” and “Is it a quarter or an eighth?”. And they can barely read their parts, so poorly are they scrawled. In performing this musical, my pit orchestra students are getting more of an education in union politics than in music!
September 11th, 2008
I have just discovered Dr. Joe Pisano’s Program Notes Wiki project. When it goes live, it will be a professional version of the class project I am considering. Follow the link and check it out.
A quick internet search suggests that no school music program is currently using a (public) student-written wiki. The most impressive music program wiki seems to be that of Oklahoma State U’s Department of Music; but alas, it seems to be merely an online handbook with no Web-2.0-style user-generated content. A couple of high schools appear to have similarly director-centered wikis. Therefore, consider this my call: if you have or know of a student-compiled school music program wiki, please let me know!
And of course, I am still looking for other possible uses of wikis in the ensemble class–applications that streamline or empower the ensemble rehearsal, rather than drag it down to the level of “school”!
September 10th, 2008
Some of my non-music colleagues used wikis in their 8th grade classes last year to create some absolutely fantastic cooperative projects. For the uninitiated, “wiki” is the software that runs Wikipedia, the world’s largest user-written reference document. Advantages of wikis in school include submit-from-anywhere portability (similar to web-based e-mail like Yahoo or Gmail), joint authorship (like Google Docs, or like a Word document on everyone’s computer at once), and the ability to track each student’s contributions (to help solve problems of “what if one student does all the work?” or “what if one student doesn’t do any of the work?”).
My question of the day: How might wikis help improve my band or music department?
My two good answers to date: (1) program notes, and (2) honor band auditions.
I have had students write their own program notes before, and it really is a good way to incorporate music history and theory into the ensemble class in a meaningful way. (For criteria about what qualifies as a meaningful activity, please read and contribute to “Criteria for Superior Rehearsal Wasting: First Draft“.) But could a wiki streamline the process on the student end, while providing me with the final typed version to cut-and-paste into the program? All while avoiding the hassles and hangups of e-mailing multiple versions of Word documents back and forth between adolescents?
I think wikis have potential in any area in which you want your students to pass their wisdom down to their successors. Think “institutional knowledge”. Institutional knowledge is what makes any band program great; institutional knowledge is the process by which excellence becomes a culture. In this vein, I am considering creating a wiki for my high schoolers to record their experiences, distill any useful advice, and pass the resulting wisdom down to next year’s auditionees. Would it work? There’s only one way to find out!
September 9th, 2008
Back to School Night at the middle school - known in many quarters as Open House. This year, in an effort to find more small performance opportunities at community events, I booked the MS Concert Band to open the ceremony with a fanfare (or in this case, a march). It’s the first time we’ve played at B2S, and the first time I have ever scheduled a performance one and a half weeks into the school year with a middle school group.
The kids played great, regardless of (or maybe in spite of) the usual middle school logistical snafus. Flute won’t blow? Take the padsaver out. Lost your music? Share with a friend tonight, and check lost-and-found in the morning. Braces are rubbing your lip? Ask around for some wax before your develop a sore. Left your neck strap at home? Billy has an extra in his case. Left your trombone at home for the third day in a row, because you came straight from little brother’s soccer game and your mom’s out of town? Sorry buddy, your horn is your responsibility. Sit over there and finger along. My students always find new ways to disappoint me.
But they always find new ways to make me proud, too. Like the young lady who arrived at school two weeks late due to travel hangups in England. She came to school one day before the performance, and I didn’t have a clarinet to check out to her. Sorry chica, try bass clarinet; it reads and fingers exactly the same as your B flat….but of course I gave her the first one I saw, and it turned out to have a faulty register key. But despite jetlag, despite sending her big brother off to college, despite having only a day to see her friends and using it to practice her part, despite playing a big new instrument, despite hating the instrument I gave her, she came to the concert and gave it her best. She came on time, wore the assigned performance attire, and played all the notes below the break. And still could manage a smile. There is only one thing for me to do: I must put a thank-you note and a couple of stickers in her cubby. It won’t be enough, but it’s all I have and she deserves it.
September 8th, 2008
Did you catch the June, 2008 issue of Teaching Music magazine from MENC? Teaching Music doesn’t do much for me most of the time, but the feature article “Out of the Box” really goes to the heart of what Third-Stream is all about. Yes, we need our flagship ensembles–bring on the Advanced Wind Ensemble, the Honors Chamber Singers, the elite Symphony Orchestra at your school–but we also need alternate ways for students to approach music. I hope we can all agree that every child deserves to have music in their lives! Students who aren’t gifted, students who come from different backgrounds, and students who just didn’t join the band in 6th grade still deserve the opportunities for happiness and personal growth that music provides. Even dedicated band students have other talents and interests; your last chair trumpeter could be the leader of your steel drum ensemble, but you’ll never know it unless you start some alternative opportunities on your campus. Alternative offerings can often be a foot in the door for recruiting talented students who otherwise would have shied away from joining the band; I recruited my jazz ensemble’s pianist and guitarist from guitar class, and a violinist for the pit orchestra from the jazz ensemble. Even the jazz ensemble was alternative and controversial in the 1950’s, and now is a staple of music education in the U.S.
Besides, bands in schools were once considered to be offensively “out of the box”….and now no school is complete without a band!
September 3rd, 2008
In my last post, I said that ensemble directors should make time for tangental topics. Today I would like to refine that idea a bit by proposing criteria for evaluating the appropriateness of specific non-performance activities during what might otherwise be rehearsal time in the secondary ensemble class. In other words, this is the first draft of How To Waste Rehearsal Time Effectively.
Non-performance activities might be defined as anything not involved with playing the instrument (or singing). For my purposes, counting and clapping rhythms aloud or singing through instrumental parts would be considered performance activities since they involve student action: manipulating sound across time. One the other hand, writing the counts of given rhythms or writing the letter names of pitches would not be a performance activity, even if the rhythms are taken from current rehearsal literature (see Criteria Two, below).
Students sign up for Band class because they want to play music, and if class does not revolve around playing the instrument then students will sign up for art next semester. That part is not rocket science. But we are beholden to our students to educate them, not simply train them to play these three works at contest, and it is the “big concepts” that will stick with them for life. Besides, half of the students in every ensemble are below average (even in your top ensemble–think about it!) and all students think in different ways….so put your “multiple intelligences” hat on. Let’s just make sure to keep it relevant to playing music.
Criteria for Superior Rehearsal Wasting, First Draft
Criterion One: Teaches or assesses specific curricular objectives. Non-performance activities in the ensemble classroom must relate directly to a specific music curriculum standard such as composing, improvising, analyzing or describing music. Of course, this assumes that your locality has standards and that you use them.
Criterion Two: Directly improves students’ ability to perform a given piece music accurately and expressively. Marking key changes, difficult rhythms or cues on the sheet music are excellent reasons to stop the baton. If used appropriately, an exercise or worksheet which explains or reinforces concepts to be used in a current or upcoming concert piece would also qualify. Writing a history of renaissance dance suites probably does not qualify as time spent well, unless you go out of your way to direct students’ attention to important stylistic or formal traits of that genre which are evident in the current rehearsal work. Once the students can play through a piece on their own reading ability, playing recordings for them can only help them to achieve stylistically appropriate performance.
Criterion Three: Helps students to apply performance traits learned in one piece to all future pieces. Applying concepts to new situations is a hallmark of an independent learner. If our students can’t learn the next piece more quickly, or perform it more expressively, than the last piece, then why did we spend all that time hammering it? Writing a biography of John Philip Sousa is not likely to help our students perform marches with better march style, but perhaps writing descriptions or drawing pictures of accented and staccato articulations will. The caveat here is that content studied must visibly relate to music that the students will actually perform; studying the sonata-allegro form is only pertinent if your students will perform a sonata-allegro this year.
Criterion Four: Gives students tools to evaluate themselves. Take the time to explicitly teach vocabulary, and insist that your students use it at appropriate times. Take the time to listen to your own concert recording in class, and have students discuss/write their critiques honestly (but diplomatically!). Take the time to listen to both superior and mediocre recorded examples, and have students fill out rubrics (or judges’ sheets). At all times, put the emphasis on suggestions and solutions, and on applying everything to their own performance.
Criterion Five: Stimulates student interest, commitment, ownership and pride in music and in the ensemble. If the students don’t love it, don’t identify with it and don’t intend to keep it with them for the rest of their lives, then why are we music teachers working these long hours? Go ahead and take ten minutes–a day, a week–to follow student interests. Do they love Nirvana? Help them write “Variations on a Theme of Kurt Cobain”. Projects that harness student interests–no matter how simple or tasteless the latest teen pop idol may be–are almost guaranteed to pay dividends back to your concert rehearsal process and to your music program in general.
That’s the first draft. I’d love to receive feedback, and create a more refined second draft. Check back soon for a future installment: “Useless Projects Which Have Actually Been Suggested to Me by Administrators”.
September 2nd, 2008
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